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“I know you’re there,” I said, latching the cart’s bellyband around Madrona’s midsection. “If you were planning on ambushing me, you’ve already lost the element of surprise. Might as well just get it over with now.” To Madrona, I said, “How’s that, girl? Nice and snug?” I gave her head a fond scratch. “Good girl.”
Brom shambled into the doorway, hunching his shoulders forward to make himself look more intimidating. “You’re a cheat,” he growled. “A filthy, whoring cheat.”
“Filthy?” I shook my head. “Only one of us deserves that description, and it certainly isn’t me. I’m not a whore, either—I lack the natural talent. Now, a cheat? I have been known to bend a few rules when the occasion calls for it. Usually, that’s when I come up against an especially witty and cunning challenger.” I gave him an unimpressed glance. “Alas, that was not the case today.”
He lunged for me, his eyes wide and shot with red, but I quickly sidestepped and sent him toppling into the stall. His anger fueled mine, and I could feel the magic respond in the blood curling in my fingertips as he scrambled to his feet and grabbed a horsewhip from where it hung looped on a hook.
He gave a few test lashes, cracking the whip into the air, a menacing grin starting over his face as he approached. The girls were right—Brom was the type to harbor a grudge.
Don’t use magic, I told myself as my blood continued to roil in response to the threat. Don’t use magic. But even after four months of abstinence, the urge had not faded in the slightest, no matter how much I tried to remind myself that a single spell could mean my death.
Giving up magic had been a necessary sacrifice: though the events of Aren’s tower didn’t kill me, the illness that plagued me for weeks afterward came close more than once. Simon hypothesized that I’d used more magic than my body could have created on its own, and that I was being forced to repay a debt of blood with every spell I attempted to cast, no matter how small. There was a chance the effects could fade with time, he suggested, but I could not afford to find out.
Still, as Brom came nearer, I wondered what difference there was between using magic and dying, and not using magic and dying.
When he got close enough to strike, I raised my arm to protect my face, letting the lash bite through the fabric of my sleeve instead. It coil
ed around my forearm like a snake, but I breathed through the sting and caught hold of the leather, ripping it from his hands with a sharp tug. The lash would leave a weal on my arm, but at least he hadn’t broken the skin; it was always harder to keep the magic in check when blood was already flowing.
Deprived of his weapon, Brom swiped at me instead, wrapping his thick arms around my torso and pulling me down into the dirt and the hay that lay scattered on the stable floor. Though drunk and clumsy, he twice outweighed me, and rage lent him a frothing, brutish might. He pinned me to the ground, spittle clinging to the singed yellow whiskers of his mustache. I gagged.
“I’ll kill you,” he said, clamping one meaty paw around my neck to allow the other to procure a dirty blade from his boot. As I gasped for air and thrashed under his crushing bulk, he said, “That’s the reward for witches and thieves.” And he held the knife over me, ready to plunge it into my chest.
My voice scraped past the clamped passage of my throat with the last dregs of air left in my lungs. “I’m not a thief.” And just as my sight began to dim, I found his eye with my thumb and drove it deep into the socket.
He screeched in pain, and I used the moment to kick him off and roll away, pulling myself up with the apple cart’s wheel. Just as soon as my feet were beneath me again, he came at me with the knife, swiping and slashing wildly, half-blind but wholly committed to my obliteration. I ducked, but one of his swings caught the canvas tied across the apples, sending dozens of them spilling through the slash and across the ground.
“Bleeding stars,” I cursed furiously. I’d have to make quicker work of this conflict, if only to avoid losing any more of the precious cargo. Madrona, however, was delighted at the unexpected gift and watched the rest of the fight placidly munching one apple after another.
Brom was already coming at me again, but I kicked him square in the chest before swinging my fist hard against his face. My technique was short on refinement, but what I lacked in finesse, I made up for in fervor, as the fire that so often surged in my blood could be burned off in a misbegotten battle almost as effectively as in a blood spell.
Almost.
Brom had his hand to his nose, which was gushing blood, thick and bright crimson. I hated that I could feel magic in his blood, too—dim and distant, but undeniable. The longer I abstained from using my own blood, the louder the call came from the blood of others. But to use unwilling blood was unconscionable; indeed, the Assembly had considered it the most egregious of trespasses, the only rule a blood mage could never break without damaging his own soul.
For centuries, Cael had used the Tribunal’s murders to provide himself with an unlimited supply of unwilling blood; I’d have rather died than take even the smallest step in his direction. Which meant I had to know when to call a fight I might otherwise have won.
“Stop!” I said as Brom made to charge again. “I’ll give you the ring. Just let me take the cart.”
He smiled through the blood, which was now coating his teeth, outlining them in crooked red lines. “Why would I take your trinket and leave without my cargo when I can just kill you now and get them both? And a pocketful of gold crowns besides?”
He jabbed the knife toward my belly at an angle that would have slid up under my ribs. I ducked to the side, grabbed his arm, and cranked it behind his back. He wrenched it back with a yowl, and we struggled over the knife for several seconds before I lost my grip on his arm. It snapped free of my grasp and popped back in his direction like a slingshot. He jumped back to keep the knife from slicing his belly, his heavy body slamming hard against the wooden beam behind him and the pitchfork that had been hanging from it. He slumped, glassy-eyed, impaled on the tines that were aligned with the back of his skull. They’d decapitated him internally, severing the connection between his spine and his brain; his death was immediate and utterly irreversible.
Through my shock, I thought for a second that I saw a wisp of his spirit. But if it did form, it was whisked away too quickly for me to witness it. This was how it was now; ever since the tower, there were no ghosts left in my world. No more spirits. No hauntings. At times like this, I was grateful I didn’t have to deal with a vicious specter so soon after vanquishing its corporeal counterpart. But often, the lack of lingerers made the world seem less crowded but lonelier.
I was still catching my breath, staring at Brom’s scarecrow corpse, when I saw a man in the doorway of the stable. I moved back.
Hicks frowned, disapproval faintly marking his otherwise expressionless face. “Bother,” he muttered gruffly. “I just cleaned these stalls.”
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said. “It’s not what you think . . .”
“Brom done kilt ’imself is what I saw.” Hicks pursed his lips. “His wife’ll be right pleased. Some o’ the girls, too.”
I gaped at him.
“Get on w’ya, girl,” Hicks said, shooing me away. “Yer interferin’ w’ my cleanin’. I’ll send word to his missus. You get them goods to th’ ones what needs ’em.”
* * *
